Did you have any interesting dreams last night? Do you know everyone dreams? But not everyone remembers their dreams. A person can usually have up to seven dreams a night, and each dream usually lasts from 10 to 40 minutes.

Why do we dream? Scientists believe that we dream to remember because dreams come from our memories and they tell us a lot about ourselves. They also help us hear from the past and even help us solve problems.

Different dreams mean differently to people. For example, if you dream about flying, you are probably quite happy. This is a good time in your life. You may feel that other people see you as a leader. And when you dream that you didn’t study for a test, it usually means you are worried about an important thing coming in your life.

Chinese is a beautiful but complex (复杂的) language, with tens of thousands of characters. When you come across a Chinese character that you don’t know, what do you do? You might look it up in a dictionary and find its pinyin. Pinyin, a system (系统) that uses the Latin alphabet (拉丁字母), tells us a how to make the sound of Chinese characters.

In 1958, Chinese linguist (语言学家) Zhou Youguang and his team created pinyin. They created the system to help illiterate (不识字的) Chinese people learn how to read. This idea worked out quite well. The illiteracy rate in China dropped from 80 percent in the 1950s to 52 percent in 1964. In 2018, it’s only 4.08 percent, Guangming Daily reported.

Nowadays in China, pupils start to learn pinyin in primary school, which plays a very important role in learning to read by themselves at an early age.

Besides helping with learning Chinese characters, pinyin has been useful in other ways, too. It helps to develop the use of standard (标准的) Chinese, or Mandarin, so that people who speak different dialects (方言) can still understand each other. It also makes it much easier to type Chinese characters on computers and cellphones. Other methods, like the five-stroke input method (五笔输入法), are much more difficult to use.

Pinyin is now finding its place in other languages. The Oxford English Dictionary now includes more than 100 pinyin entries (词条), such as jiaozi for “dumplings” and zhongguomeng for “Chinese dream”.